Thursday, July 2, 2015

Going Back To An Office

This is where I work.

For more than four years I've had it pretty good; great even. It was almost five years ago when my company decided we should all be home based employees.

We already worked from home two days a week, so it wasn't a titanic-hitting-an-iceberg change. Still, I was anxious about the change. Would I become a hermit? How would I handle working at home everyday? Would I miss the social interaction. Would I miss a 5 mile commute that at times took 45 minutes. Okay, so I could safely say I wouldn't miss that last part.

Still, it was a big change.

Little did I know, bigger changes were on the horizon. Just a few months later I would change in my soon-to-be impossibly small car for an pickup truck. Despite wanting a pickup truck, the one I settled on seemed at the time impracticably oversized. We were firmly entrenched in fertility issues. There was a growing chance we weren't having kids at all. And even when - if? - we finally had a child, why would I need an entire second row of seats?

Just months after that purchase, in bam-bam style, we learned about our pregnancy and impending task of raising triplets. And suddenly, the dimensions of seats relative to three car seats became of paramount importance.

Being home helped when my wife went on bed rest for 3 weeks and it certainly played a role in me visiting her every day of the 9 weeks she spent on bed rest in the hospital. And so, a year after becoming a home-based employee and nine weeks of hospital bed rest I became the father to the most awesome triplets you could possibly imagine.

I've been working from home for the entirety of my kids' lives. The arrangement made life so much easier. No need to worry about whether the nanny has a vehicle, or leaving a stranger at home with the kids, or having to worry about deadlines to pick the kids up and drop them off. It was absolutely awesome working at home for the first four years of their lives.

I'm not one of those people who will tell you things happen for a reason. But if I was ever to believe in something like that, this would be the case. So many of life's rapid-filled creeks converged into one smooth river. Looking back, it almost seems as if the universe spent four years setting us up in a perfect situation for triplets. Things dovetailed very nicely. It was almost kizmet. It was certainly a great run.

Next Thursday that run ends. I'll give my kids a kiss goodbye and head out the door, for the first time ever.

Because a couple months ago, we were informed of another huge life change: we were going back to a part-time office setting starting next week.

Now, hopefully everything will fall into place once again. I've lived a pretty blessed life, and I can't help wonder sometimes if I've reached Peak Karma and things are about to just fall apart. But then my mind takes over - most of the time - and I realize that a lot of the reason things have worked out isn't out of some universal kindness, but because we have made it work.

Having triplets could have made us miserable. Rarely leaving the house could have made me miserable. Any number of things could make us miserable. But we choose not to let it.

BONUS: I'd be remiss if I didn't direct you to Gretchen Rubin's site. She has a LOT to say about the science of happiness and how to achieve it. I've been a longtime follower of her blog about happiness and am in the middle of reading her book The Happiness Project. She also wrote the most apropos quote I've ever read about parenting: "The days are long and the years are short."